Ahem,
Hi fellow dopers, please see this article found
on todays ruters site - it’s about a woman who
was dead for 10 months in her apartment before
she was discovered:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20011101/od/corpse_dc_1.html
Any idea who nobody SMELLED it?
Thanx,
Janx!
Because the neighbors were all cooking bratwurts & drinking beer? Bleah…
ObGermanJoke:
The next time you hear a car commercial that speaks of “superior German engineering,” think about that . . .
Supposedly Jeffrey Dahmer was able to decompose/cook several dead bodies because the neighbors thought he was cooking chitlins!!! Really makes you wonder about chitlins, eh?
they often do here anyway when old people die alone in their appartments , course there was this guy discovered dead in his basement after drinking himself to death several hundered empty bottles were on one side of him and several hundred full bottles the otherside , he didn’t go rotten either as the immense quantity of alcohol pickled his body
That reeks of UL. Or it reeks of Wild Turkey. Anyway, gotta cite?
I seen dead bodies that failed to rot. There are no real scientific explanations. They just claim that some chemicals must have kept bacteria or fungus from decomposing the body.
About the OP, it makes no sense at all. The article makes it sound like even when they went in to clear out the apt, they did not smell it. Which I really doubt it!
I think people can smell odor but not bad odor where you call the police cuz the door was closed and probably pretty much sealed or the other explanation i can come up with is that the kitchen fan was on so the smell was sucked out, so very lil odor penetrated the front door.
maybe the decomposing fungus took over and not the decomposing bacteria. The decomposing bacteria produce more fowl smell than the fungus variety. But this is based on anecdotal evidence. I never came across a scientific paper on smell of these two. Plus, grouping them as decomposing fungus/bacteria means I am generalizing/categorizing a bit.
If the person dies in the autumn and it’s very cold, the body might well have time to lose a lot of it’s moisture slowly during winter and end up mummified rather than rotting.
Hey, don’t knock it. My bank screws this up all the time, and I’m alive.
While I make no comment on the incident in the OP, this can really, honest-to-god happen. I’ve seen reports of it happening several times in Australian cities - Sydney and Adelaide.
Sometimes buildings are tightly sealed, which prevents the smell escaping, sometimes the neighbours just don’t give enough of a toss to check on their elderly neighbour, and then the smell goes away.
Recall William Faulkner’s wonderfully macabre story “A Rose for Emily.”
:eek:
They smelled it, all right, but Emily bluffed them out of investigating. Southern gentility helped her. “‘Dammit, sir,’ Judge Stevens said, ‘will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?’”
While not common, a body can indeed mummify and not rot if it is a cold and dry atmosphere. I suppose being very thin should help and maybe drinking a couple gallons of whisky…
My understanding was that “the one who smelt it dealt it” which was not the case with the neighbours. However, they do fall under the category of “the one who denied it supplied it”. Your question reminds me of the world’s oldest joke.
DrP I met a dog that had no nose.
Janx How did it smell?
DrP Awful.
(Board erupts with sound of gunfire.)
Vaguely…remembering…anecdote…formaldehyde…bodies not decomposing…Damn 8:30 classes! Seiously, though, my prof mentioned this THIS MORNING as part of one of his weird tangent stories! But I can’t remember what it was that people were supposedly consuming that contained formaldehyde and hence people weren’t decomposing when they died, so they started using the stuff as preservative. Anyone know?
People who drink too much methanol (wood alcohol) make formaldehyde. This incrdient is found in cheap blind pig liqour and Aqua Velva (the preferred shot of Saint John yahoos).
Marchino cherries are - I was told as a kid -
preserved with formaldehyde, but I imagine you would
kill yourself trying to eat enough to avoid an
embalmers bill.
I posted this actually because I couldn’t believe no one
complained about the stench, while the above suggestions
look plausible, I just cant believe the smell from
a corps left to rot for 10 months didn’t draw ANY attention,
while its possible (I suppose) the corps didn’t stink, (as written above),I don’t believe it - those scenarios are the exceptions not the rule.
As for the guy drinking himself to death in his basement,
I haven’t found anything on that - and I seriously doubt
it happened, intresting yarn though, the competitave
drinking teams should encorporate that event into
there meetings.
Actually, Mr. Dahmer’s neighbors complained about the smell a number of times prior to the final discovery but the authorities apparently blew off the complaints, and the one time the police did drop by Mr. D said he’d had some hamburger go bad while on a short trip and he had thrown it out the day before.
A lot of cooking foods smell bad - my mom’s sauerkraut, for instance, was a violation of the Geneva convention and could empty out an entire block - but I think I’d wonder more about a “nice” yankee white boy cooking chitlins than about the chitlins themselves. In this part of the country (Chicago/Milwaukee area) they’re considered pretty much “soul food” and almost never made or eaten by white folks.
Anyhow, if you clean chitlins up properly (never a pleasent job) they don’t smell that bad when cooking. And not to be too blunt, but uncleaned chitlins don’t smell like rotten meat, they smell like shit.
They might just think it was a dead rodent in the walls. There was a smell in one room of my apartment as though something had died. It lasted for about a week, and I had maintenance up here several times and they couldn’t find anything in the walls (not that they looked all that hard). Never occurred to me or them to check the next-door apartment on the other side of that room. Do dead humans smell for more than a week or two?
Cool.
slight hyjack-
What’s a chitlin?
d